Technology.Life.Insight.

I came across a thread in the TechNet forums discussing printer queue naming best practices. One of the Microsoft Printing Team members chimed in to explain how they do it internally in Microsoft.

At Microsoft the printer names are associated only with locations + A, B, C and CLR if it’s color.

Possible examples: Sales-A-CLR or Bldg3_Flr2_West-A

They then include more detail in the location field and device brand, model, PCL/PS, etc in the comments field. This way the queue (name) is not married to a specific printer type. When they physically replace a printer they only have to change the driver and port name, then update the comments. A very clean and simple way to do it.

When the user searches for network printers using AD they will see:

NAME (this is the share name of the print queue)

LOCATION (text has been entered in the location field of the print queue)

MODEL (driver in use on the print queue – very misleading unless 1:1 always in place)

SERVER NAME (the print server where the print queue resides)

COMMENTS (text has been entered in the comment field of the print queue)